Mexico to Act on Illegal Immigration  from Central America. Mexico, the source of millions of illegal immigrants to the United States, has its own illegal immigration problem, from Central America. Now, a proposed reform in its immigration laws embraces a guest-worker program for Central Americans, like that proposed by the Bush Administration for Mexicans. At least that's what I heard on one of the Spanish-language network newscasts this evening, probably Univisión.* When I tried to get more info from the Internet, I did not see the story on either Univisión's or Telemundo's website. (Actually, if you try to go to www.telemundo.com, you are redirected to Yahoo Telemundo. Telemundo is now a subsidiary of NBC and partner of Yahoo.)+Mexico's 750-mile border with Guatemala (mainly) and Belize is a problem area. Even poorer people than Mexicans, from Central America (not just Guatemala and Belize, but points south as well) look for work in Mexico, and seek to pass thru Mexico to get to the United States. Drug traffic also passes thru Mexico's porous southern border, and some of the same problems of "coyotes" (people smugglers) and common criminals preying upon migrants mark Mexico's southern border as mark our southern border. The main advantage Mexico enjoys over the U.S. in regard to controlling illegal immigration is the length (or shortness) of its southern border, only 600 miles with Guatemala, which is where most of the problems arise, and another 150 with Belize (the former British Honduras), not the 2,000 miles we have with Mexico.+If the U.S. annexed Mexico as perhaps ten States of the Union, our southern border would be 750 miles long, not 2,000. If we annexed Central America as well, as another six states, our southern border would be only about 140 miles. And the economic development and social change that statehood brings would keep by far most of the people of those areas where they now live and would prefer to live. The rest of the Nation would get mainly "the best and the britest", the people who want to fly high in their chosen profession, in top cities like New York, Chicago, and L.A. These wouldn't be the gardeners and dishwashers that current migration brings, but the professionals, models, artists, and creative people who make the melting pot of our great cities so dynamic and productive. That kind of migration would serve us all. The migration we now have serves no one really well.+Mexico is apparently going to try its own guest-worker (bracero) program for Central Americans, in hopes of regulating the flow to benefit rather than subvert the Mexican economy, just as a bracero program here would match employers to temporary workers and provide an orderly means by which people whose only interest in this country is money, to make that money during a limited period only, and then go home. Mexico wants its illegals to go home too.+Mexico's present policy on its southern border not only hasn't worked but has also outraged human-rights observers. Read, for instance, these two paragraphs from last month by Liam Weston, a columnist for the Sacramento Union newspaper:

Mexico ... is not so generous when its national sovereignty is being violated. Since 1974, anyone found entering Mexico illegally is subject to two years of incarceration, if they are lucky. For years Mexican troops on Mexico’s southern border have used land mines and assault rifles to deter Central American immigrants from entering Mexico. Anyone trying to cross Mexico’s southern border illegally can be killed with little or no notice to the media.

Escaping the troops still does not mean that immigrants without documentation are out of trouble once inside Mexico. In the mid-80’s, a Nicaraguan friend’s younger sister successfully penetrated Mexico’s southern border by bribing guards. However, she was later caught in northern Mexico without appropriate paperwork. The 17-year old recounted her nightmare of being dragged off a public bus and repeatedly raped in a guard shack. She dared not report the crime to other officials since her illegal status in Mexico could have earned her two years in a Mexican jail.

If true, this incident helps to explain why more than twice as many people in an online poll at Yahoo Telemundo** find corruption a greater problem for Latin America than poverty.+That is a grossly underappreciated "push" factor in migration out of Latin America to the United States. Latin America is horrible, especially to the poor, and when people talk about "opportunity" as a "pull" factor in migration to the United States, they are really talking about more than the opportunity to make a few bucks. The opportunity to be treated like a human being and pursue one's own life by one's own lites is a large part of what drives people to take great pains, spend a lot of money, and brave terrible hardships and dangers to get out of Latin America and into the United States. Plainly, if we want to reduce illegal immigration from Latin America, we should be doing everything in our considerable power to democratize that region socioeconomiocally and break down the barriers to social mobility across all-too-rigid class boundaries in the bulk of this Hemisphere.+I didn't have the time or patience today to read thru the entire 15-page discussion of Mexico's immigration problem that I found on the University of Idaho website. This is, after all, not news to me. I've known about it for some time. But I did note these introductory remarks, which show that the author, Melinda S. Oja, appreciates some of the factors impelling migration from Latin America to the U.S.

Immigration is not a new phenomenon. Long before small-scale societies emerged, man roamed the earth, primarily in search of food. The principle reason that migration is noticed today is the establishment of organized states with defined borders. * * *

Social, political, and economic factors called “push factors” influence potential migrants when making the decision to leave their host country. Push factors like of underdevelopment, poverty, corruption, exploitation, low wages, the lack of land and jobs, income disparities, or political strife are major causes of international outward migration[footnote omitted]. It can also be caused by overcrowding because of high population density, as in the case of El Salvador[footnote omitted]. The lure of higher wages, possible employment, higher standards of living, cultural support networks, and freedom from political violence are examples of factors that “pull” a potential migrant towards another country. Though many upper class members of developing societies migrate as well, the dramatic push/pull factors of international migration are most influential on members of the poor sectors of society who have less to lose by migrating[footnote omitted]

Still, Ms. Oja doesn't quite "get it". The poor leave Latin America because Latin America is grossly unfair, and no matter how talented they might be, Latin America's poor cannot rise as high as their talents would take them in a fair society.+Conversely, the reason the upper classes of Latin nations tend to stay put is that they are living high on the hog at the expense of the downtrodden whom their class 'keeps in its place'. The only social mobility the upper classes see is downward mobility if they let the poor rise, and they certainly don't want that. They have a static view of the economic pie: there's only so much pie to go around, and if the poor get a bigger slice, the rich get a smaller slice, so small that they can't live well, or might even starve. But that's not the way economic opportunity in a free society works.+When you give everybody the chance to rise according to their abilities, you free energies that create new products, inventions, services; and you unleash new purchasing power that creates new wealth for everyone.+The rich in most countries, not just Third World countries, have a seesaw or teetertotter view of social mobility: if some people rise, others must fall. But society is not a teetertotter. There is plenty of room at the middle and top, and general prosperity and personal freedom make life better for everyone, even those who now jealously guard their privileged turf against intruders.+I can thus readily agree with the general thrust of Ms. Oja's conclusion:

It is not enough to address the symptoms of international migration. Though politicians may feel that all they need to offer is short-term solutions to a long standing problem, the only way to achieve a genuine reduction in the number of illegal migrants that migrate through Central America and Mexico is to diminish the factors that push immigrants out of the country. The final solution must be focused on long term results and contain policies that address government and police corruption, underdevelopment, poverty, population growth, job creation via micro credit, the production of food for consumption, appropriate technology and development, increased penalties for human smugglers, and more effective border enforcement. The only way to reduce the flow of migration is to be realistic—it is a long-term project and requires special attention and participants must be dedicated to long term solutions.

That goes for Mexican policy vis-a-vis Central America as much as for U.S. policy toward Mexico.____________________

* I switch among the evening news shows in English and Spanish during commercials on ABC, which I tune in first. I worked for a few months for an ABC News documentary unit my first office job after high school, in 1964, so have always preferred ABC to the other networks. My Spanish is less than perfect, but I can understand a fair amount of newscasts, since Spanish newscasts use full sentences, unlike the grammatical fragments so in favor today on, for instance, the Fox News Channel (the "-ing thing": "Fox News talking in fragments", "Media annoying Schoonmaker with their willful violation of the rules of English".)

In your opinion, why is the Council of Europe so dead-set against the death penalty?

I replied:

I think it probably has much to do with the abuse of the death penalty by authoritarian, Fascist, Nazi, and Communist dictatorships in recent European history, and is thus an overreaction that carries over a rational concern about abuse by the state in the bad old days into a democratic era when juries and other safeguards against government abuse are in place. It is thus irrational now and should be modified. By contrast, the United States has never had a dictatorship sweeping its enemies from the streets into gulags and death camps. We know the death penalty is a personal punishment for personal crimes, not an instrument of state oppression used against enemies of a particular dictator or regime.+There is also the difference between the collectivist and individualist mindsets. Part of individualism is being held personally accountable for one's actions. In a collectivist mindset, one is only the product of social forces, and so is not really fully accountable, and thus shouldn't be severely and individually punished for what others contributed to.+I imagine, but do not know, that Europe's crime rates since the end of capital punishment in each country have risen, for many categories of crime. The death penalty has proved salutary in diminishing crime in general in the United States, presumably because many criminals understand that embarking on a life of crime is setting out on a road that could lead to The Last Mile, as one steps up from petty crime and petty punishments to hard crime and hard time, to capital crime and capital punishment.+During the Supreme Court-mandated moratorium [on capital punishment], crime rates rose gradually to oppressive levels. After the restoration of capital-punishment laws, they dropped. In some places, like New York State, they dropped like a stone. But after several years went by and nobody had in fact been executed, the criminal class got the message: it's a sham. So crime rates have risen again. Many prosecutors refuse to pursue capital offenses as capital cases, violating their oath of office. And the endless appeals that mean that it is rare that anyone can be executed in less than 14 years or so after conviction have also produced a credibility problem with capital punishment here, except in a few places, like Texas and Florida, where the threat seems real. In New Jersey, we haven't had an execution within memory, and now the Legislature is thinking about abolishing capital punishment  even as we have massive gang violence in our inner cities! Wikipediasays, "No one has been executed by the state of New Jersey since 1963, although a statute reinstating capital punishment for murder has been in force since 1982."+Inasmuch as studies have showed (or shown, if you prefer) that a tiny fraction of hardened criminals are responsible for the bulk of murders and other grave crimes, a small number of executions would do outsize service to society. But it's not "nice" to kill, even criminals. Timid people are terrified of making a mistake, and are unwilling to admit that there are many cases in which there isn't the tiniest doubt as to the guilt of a killer  for instance, the crime is captured on video camera and witnessed by dozens of people, some of whom knew the killer personally before the crime; and circumstantial/physical evidence is overwhelming: fingerprints on the gun, powderburns on the skin and clothing; a confession on video; and on, and on. Even if one could make a case for caution when there is any significant possibility of error, there can be no moral case against execution when there is no possibility of error and no conceivable justification for the crime. Remorse is nothing; you don't have to feel remorse if you don't commit the crime. Cheers.

British Troop Redeployment, Australian Troop Addition. Britain announced this past week that it would be withdrawing troops from its zone of occupation, in the Shiite area of southern Iraq. The British government said that conditions were so improved there that its troops could go to Afghanistan instead.+If Blair is sincere about wanting to help bring peace to Iraq, he should be redeploying British troops northward to help in Baghdad, Anbar Province, and other areas still in tumult. If Blair does not help out where help is really needed, what kind of ally is he?+Britain is planning to withdraw some 1,600 troops from Iraq and redeploy about 1,000 of those to Afghanistan. The claim is that they aren't needed in southern Iraq now. The reality may be different. According to the Los Angeles Times two days ago:

[The redeployment] was widely seen Wednesday as a telling admission that the British military could no longer sustain simultaneous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The British military is approaching "operational failure," former defense staff chief Charles Guthrie warned this week.

"It's either [move troops from Iraq to Afghanistan], or you risk in some ways losing both," he said. "It's the classic case of 'Let's declare victory and get out.'

Perhaps Bush should try that. If Blair can get away with it, why not Bush?+Is Britain pulling its own weight? Britain has about 60 million people overall, and will after this redeployment have at most 7,500 troops in Iraq and 6,000 in Afghanistan, for a total of less than 14,000. The U.S. has about 140,000 troops in Iraq and 18,000 in Afghanistan, for a total of 158,000 (from what I can determine by Internet search). If we had the same level of representation, per capita, as Britain, we'd have 70,000 troops total in both places. Put the other way around, if Britain had the same representation per capita as we, they'd have 31,600 troops in the field, more than twice what they have actually fielded.+Barack Obama asked a question of the same sort about Australia after the stupid, meddling Prime Minister of Australia said that Obama's call for the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq sent the wrong message, and that Americans should therefore reject Obama's bid for the presidency. Obama responded that if Australia is so adamant about the importance of staying the course in Iraq and seeing to it that Iraq achieves a stable democracy and does not become a haven for terrorists, Australia should send more troops to Iraq. Put your guns where your mouth is, as it were.+Well, Australia is talking about increasing its forces in Iraq, by 70. That is not a typo. 70. Not 700, not 7,000, not 70,000. 70. The total Australian contribution to this Iraq effort that Howard says is so important is around 1,400. It has another 550 or so troops in Afghanistan, and is talking of increasing its contribution by another 530 or so. Let's see how that compares to the U.S. engagement, per capita.+Australia has about 1/15th our population. Divide the U.S. troop level in Iraq and Afghanistan (c. 158,000) by 15 and you get 10,533. Australia's actual contribution will, after increases in Afghanistan, total around 2,500, 1/4 the per capita contribution the U.S. is making. Australia talks mighty proud for a country that is doing so little.+Australia has been in the news a lot more, lately, than usual. Ordinarily, if we hear anything at all from Australia in six months, that's a lot. Now, the Australian Prime Minister's hawkish comments, and criticisms of his stance by the leader of the opposition, have made U.S. news several times. And U.S. Vice President Cheney is currently on a visit to Australia, from which he is attacking various Democratic candidates for President. Interesting timing.+You see, I posted only February 15th the first presentation on Australia to be hosted on the website of the Expansionist Party of the United States ("XP"). "Australian-U.S. Union, a Personal View", by Bill Dekmetzian of Hobart, Tasmania, advocates that Australia join the Union. Were Australia part of the United States and entitled to vote for President, the remarks by John Howard, its present Prime Minister (an office that would vanish into history), would be legitimate political debate instead of the intolerable foreign interference in our elections that it is now. Howard could even challenge for the Presidency himself — assuming that the annexation of Australia were accomplished by treaty that provides that anyone who acquired Australian citizenship by birth would be deemed to have acquired U.S. citizenship by birth, and thus be eligible to run for President.+Dekmetzian, the author of XP's presentation, is concerned that the case of David Hicks, an Australian held captive by the Bush Administration in Guantanamo, is poisoning Australian attitudes toward the U.S. Melbourne's distinguished newspaper, The Age, reported the appearance of Hicks's American lawyer today in South Australia:

In Adelaide to have talks with Hicks' family, Maj Mori used [a] rally, entitled David Hicks - Where to now?, to criticise the Australian government's support of the military commission system created to try Guantanamo Bay detainees. * * *

"The new system, like the old system, cannot be used to try Americans and that can be the very first signal that it is not a fair system," Maj Mori said.

"If it is not fair enough for an American citizen then how is it fair enough for an Australian? It is not."

Two points emerge plainly. (1) If Australians wish to gain release for David Hicks, they must first get their own government to reverse its stance that the imprisonment of detainees in Guantanamo and their subjection to military tribunals is just fine, which it has not done. And (2) if Australia were part of the United States, Mr. Hicks could not be tried by military tribunal.+Australia is independent of the United States only by accident of history. In World War II, the U.S. almost certainly could have forced Australia to join the Union as a condition for sending U.S. forces to defend Australia against Japan, which was roaring near. For reasons that escape me, FDR made no such demand.+There has been some talk in historical circles recently that Winston Churchill proposed union of Britain and France in World War II, and even that France's Premier Guy Mollet proposed merger a second time, to British PM Anthony Eden in 1956, to keep both independent of the Soviet Union and United States. See, for example, this mention in Australia's Sydney Morning Herald, which discusses not only that proposal but others:

But proposals for Anglo-French unity are not new.

Winston Churchill, in a last-ditch attempt to keep France on the side of the Allies in World War II, appealed for a full union of the two nations in June of 1940.

After the war, Ernest Bevin, Britain's foreign secretary, also toyed with the idea of a "Western Union", a European - and African - bloc led by Britain and France.

None of that happened, exactly, tho the EU's Lomé Convention; and later Cotonou Agreement have created a neo-colonial 'community' of former colonies with their former overlords.+Apparently, Charles de Gaulle in 1940 was prepared to accept union of Britain and France, because German Panzer divisions were rolling across France. But once France had a new, German-installed government, the plan hadn't a chance, at the one point in time it might have happened, the WWII emergency.+The U.S. wasn't thinking expansively in World War II. Everything was defense. FDR made no annexation demands upon Australia as a condition to the U.S. saving it from imminent conquest by the exploding Empire of Japan, and even allied us with the Soviet Union, a deal that led to catastrophe for East Europe and then the planet, as wartime alliance turned to Cold War, with a nuclear arms race and many hot-spot proxy wars.+Perhaps we can do, in peacetime, what we didn't do in wartime, add Australia to our Union. But perhaps we shouldn't call this "peacetime", when both Australia and the United States have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and both are fiting a "War on Terror". Might this new war spur a political union that, as far as I can see, would have no downside? Time will tell.+Americans should pay more attention to Australia. It might be voting for President someday.+(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,154 — for Israel.)

Unwanted commercial e-mail has surged in recent months as online fraudsters, bogus pharmaceutical suppliers and others send billions of pieces of spam engineered to pierce defenses at companies of all sizes. The share of e-mail deemed junk rose as high as 80% last month from as low as 47% in September, says software security firm Symantec [Norton].

Unfortunately, it gives little guidance but to use a spam filtering program and perhaps take a temporary email address you can delete if it is flooded by spam. All my email is thru AOL (seven addresses), which itself has a spam filter, so I don't have to look for one on my own. But lots gets thru, and since I receive email from strangers who see various of my websites, I have to check the spam folder and click on "This is not spam" to allow legitimate senders to reach me.+Individual self-defense does not work. Government needs to act. Spammers need to be fined so heavily that spamming becomes an oppressive cost to advertisers. "Fraudsters" need to be imprisoned. That would work. Spam filters merely diminish the imposition; they do not end it.+My colleague in Durham, England today alerted me to a website, "An Anti-Spam Manifesto", that in November 2003 proposed a means by which huge numbers (tens of thousands) of private citizens, using the spare computing power of their PC's and the postal services of various nations, could deluge spammers with so many useless replies as would render their scams unworkable. Alas, that is much too demanding of private persons, and thus undoable.+Ending computer crime is not, I repeat, not the personal responsibility of any individual. Protecting us from crime is GOVERNMENT'S job. It is, in fact, one of the prime reasons we put up with government to begin with.+On two things, however, the Anti-Spam Manifesto is right: (1) there are forces that are delited there is spam (including malicious spams that distribute viruses and trojans), because they sell products to fite off such attacks, and (2) spammers need to give intended victims a way to contact them in order to gain any benefit from their crime. (This is, alas, not the case with malicious virus-spreaders, who deliberately hurt strangers for no apparent reason, altho some may be agents of the Communist Chinese Government testing vulnerabilities of the West.) The fact that they have to give people a way to get money to them is, indeed, as the Anti-Spam Manifesto points out, their "soft underbelly".+I keep a word-processing file on my computer in which I have stored various messages that I can copy into transmittal emails to AOL's TOSSpam (Terms of Service-Spam) email box when I forward spams that I have had to open to make sure they were not legitimate messages from strangers. Here is the basic paragraph, with the quintessence of the matter in bold:

"ALERT [*] and Interpol, and PROSECUTE this attempt to defraud AOL subscribers! If fools can lose money by following up these emails, police can surely track down and prosecute these scam artists. You are plainly not doing anything like what you need to do in the way of prosecutions, because these things keep arriving, year after year after year!"____________________

* I fill in here the name Yahoo, Virgilio, MSN, OrangeHome, or other legitimate service misappropriated by fraudsters. Those services need to know what accounts to delete and, if they have a way to track these things, whom to block from opening new email accounts or websites in the future.

Only governments have the resources and physical force to remedy this problem. Police can physically attack, capture, and haul off to jail the people committing these crimes. The state can physically imprison or flog violators, even execute egregious and repeat offenders. You can't. I can't. 30,000 individual computer owners working in concert to flood mailboxes, as proposed in the Anti-Spam Manifesto, can't do any of that.+At end, the human being is only an animal terrified of pain and death. That is the way people have always been controlled, and prevented from attacking each other: by a higher authority capable of crushing them. It can be a real authority, a government that can seize and ravage them. It can be an imaginary authority, God (or gods) in His (their) omniscience and omnipotence, who sees evildoing even when human society cannot, and whose retribution after death if not even before cannot be evaded. Be it the whipping post, a dismal cell in a dungeon, and slow starvation from bread and water over the course of years of imprisonment, or the agonies of hell upon eternal damnation, only fear of punishment controls bad people. Absent such fear, all attempts to control spam are nonsense.+Flog ten of the bastards, and the problem drops by 80% overnite. Kill ONE, and the problem drops by 95% overnite. Kill ONE MORE a month later, and 95% of the 5% who were not scared off the first time will run for cover and hope that they have not already been targeted for death.+We don't have to tolerate rapacity. There are vastly more of Us than of Them, and we have all the power, if only we will use it. Seize the mass-scam scum, imprison them, flog them, execute them, and we are free forever from this needless social problem, a problem that exists only because our governments are wusses who consent to it.+(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,150  for Israel.)

Scamspam. Every single day we receive emailed attempts to rob us. I got 12 on one screenname today alone. Each day, the world's Internet service providers (ISP's) transmit BILLIONS of scamspams that attempt to defraud scores of millions of people out of thousands of dollars apiece. The U.S. Government does nothing about this. The state governments do nothing. The Government of Nigeria, the country that is the source of a large proportion of all such scams, does nothing about it, and may indeed be "in on it". This is an outrage, and people in every target country should demand that their government actively track down, prosecute, and imprison the guilty  and penalize the Government of Nigeria for its complicity in such crimes. The United Nations should organize worldwide sanctions against Nigeria to end this relentless campaign of massive fraud.+That's the long-term solution. The short-term solution is for every email service provider to send a welcome email to every new subscriber, and at least once a year send a reminder email to all subscribers, warning of the most common scams. It should say something like this:+(1) If you haven't entered a lottery, you haven't won a lottery. Period. Microsoft doesn't run lotteries that select people off the Internet without their entering. Nor does the government of the Netherlands, nor Britain, nor any other country or business or charity or any other legitimate enterprise of any kind anywhere on Earth.+(2) No one is scouring the Internet looking for worthy private persons to send money to if only they will invest it in local development projects or charities. It doesn't matter if they are recent converts to Christianity dying from some dread disease.+(3) If any foundation or charitable giver wants to give you money for your good works, they will send you a check by postal mail that you can deposit in your bank account without your ever having to do more than that to get the cash. You will not have to send them a prepayment "good faith deposit", "processing fee", or anything else, for even one cent, much less hundreds or even thousands of dollars.+(4) Never give anyone you don't know the details of your bank account. Ever. Legitimate, aboveboard, legal transfers of funds can be done perfectly well by ordinary check sent by certified mail. They do not have to be wired to your account.+(5) If you receive an offer from Africa or anyplace else to transfer millions of dollars into your bank account so they can get it out of the country past legal barriers, and for that service you will be granted some percentage of the proceeds, it is a scam, without question. Delete the email after reporting it to your email service. If it were an actual transfer against legal prohibitions, you would be guilty of complicity in a crime, in helping criminals evade the law.+(6) If you are the legitimate, intended recipient of a bequest, you will never have to put up money to receive anything anyone leaves you in a will.+(7) If you are asked to pose as the next of kin of someone who has died and left a large sum of money in an abandoned account, or to claim rights to an excess-funds account from an African government agency, national oil company, etc., you are being scammed.+(8) Further, if you were even to try to do anything like that, you would be guilty of a crime that could send you to prison for a very long time. So if all you do is lose several thousand dollars because of your greed and criminal predilections, it will serve you right.+(9) If someone says he has a business that needs a U.S. representative to process payments from American customers and forward the proceeds after deducting a percentage for yourself, you are being scammed. Merchant banks for legitimate businesses can process payments from every country on Earth. No legitimate business needs a private person in a foreign country to process payments for them.+(10) There is no such thing as a pill that can enlarge the penis.+(11) Legitimate pharmacies do not send spam emails to strangers. Those that do business via the Internet have websites that people come to of their own initiative. There are hefty fines for businesses that send out unsolicited commercial emails in bulk (spam). Having to pay such fines would more than overbalance any profit they might reap thru such a practice. Thus, if you order from such a business, you risk receiving bogus medications that are at best knockoffs, second-best are worthless panaceas (sugar pills or the like), and at worst chemicals that could be dangerous to your health  if, that is, they don't just take your money and send you nothing at all.+(12) Legitimate stockbrokers do not send out announcements to strangers about great stocks that are just about to explode in value. The people who do that have themselves bought that stock in volume and want to pump up the price by inducing fools to buy those shares at a much higher price than they would ever be worth in a rational world, because there is no underlying strength to the business as to warrant such a high price. That's the best possibility. Another possibility is that the stock is a complete fraud that does not represent shares in anything.+(13) If you receive email that appears to be from a bank, credit union, eBay, PayPal, or any other legitimate business that you have an account with, and that asks you to go to a link within that email, don't go. Hover your cursor over the ostensible link and see if what appears below agrees with the text of the link. The company you know should be the very first thing in the URL after the "http://", in exactly the correct form, e.g., "bankofamerica.com". If it is not, it is a scam. If the first item differs by even one character, e.g., "bankofamerica.net", or, as was tried by one scammer, "bankofarnerica" (that's lowercase RN, not M), it is a scam. If it is a little different as might be legitimate, e.g., "service.bankofamerica.com", still don't go via that link. Instead, go to the main website at the URL you always use and see if you can find the asserted site on your own. (Bank of America has in fact built in another level of security for its customers, a "SiteKey" you can check. If the SiteKey that appears is not correct, or if no SiteKey appears, you know not to type in your account info. Not all companies that work online have such a security measure, so the customer has to be very careful about where s/he types in account login and password information.)+(14) If putting your mouse on a link does not produce a rollover box that reveals the actual destination of the link, do not go to that site. If you nevertheless, recklessly, should click on such a link, look at the fill-in box within your browser that shows the actual destination you have reached. If it is not what it is supposed to be, leave immediately, and report it to your ISP.+The cautions above are the very fewest every ISP should issue to every subscriber every year. There may be others.+Some ISP's will track down the scamsites they know about and block them as known "phishing" sites. "Phishing" is an attempt to get foolish (gentle word for "stupid") people to type in their account name and password so the phishers can later log into that account themselves and steal.+We should not have to protect ourselves from thieves. That's one of the most fundamental of the responsibilities of government. But our governments won't protect us from scamspam, phishing, and other Internet fraud, so we have to protect ourselves.+(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,150  for Israel.)

Popcult Meltdown (and 6 Other Topics, in Very-Brief). The media have been filled of late with insane amounts of coverage of the death of Anna Nicole Smith and the erratic behavior of Britney Spears. Some observers see serious drug use in both cases. I don't know, and frankly don't much care. I am disgusted with drug addicts and have no sympathy for them. I don't want my tax moneys, nor moneys taken from other decent, hardworking people, diverted from programs that benefit sensible people to instead helping self-indulgent losers get off drugs. Aside from the fact that such efforts cannot succeed unless the addict really wants to change, my stance is that these people didn't need any help to get onto drugs. Why should they need help to get off them? Drug addicts are self-destructive. If they die from their vice, they get their wish. Let's be happy for them — and for a society freed from them.+If they really want to change, they can change. Interventions and rehabilitation programs may provide structure toward self-reinforcing rather than self-destructive behaviors, but to the extent drug-dependent individuals need such programs, they can damned well pay for them themselves. They found a way to support a drug habit. They can support a rehab program. And if they can't, that's their problem, not ours.+Britney Spears stayed in rehab one day! At least she's paying for her own program. If she ends up dying from drugs, so be it. Let's just find a good home for her kids and stop wasting the public's time and attention on a poor little rich girl — be it Britney or Anna Nicole.+XM Gets Sirius. The Nation's two satellite-radio services want to join, in a "merger of equals". The FCC should not permit it. No waiver from antitrust laws should be granted, because a single player will have uncontrolled power to abuse potential subscribers, and it is the public that is supposed to be protected by antitrust legislation. If these services are in financial trouble, it is because of the preposterous amounts they have paid 'people' like the loathsome Howard Stern (the one who insults the world, not the one who may have murdered Anna Nicole Smith and her son). Let them cut back on such outrageous overpayments and they may establish long-term viability on their own, each service competing with an actual alternative. The public must have choice.+More Mount Hood Morons. Three climbers had to be rescued from an accident on Mount Hood, Oregon today. This is the same mountain three other hikers died on not long ago. The rescue attempt for those fools cost the public a lot of money. The rescue effort for these other fools — and who but fools goes hiking on a mountain in the bitter, subfreezing cold of winter? — doubtless cost the taxpayers of Oregon (or the Nation) more money. Climbers should be dissuaded from stupidity, and taxpayers should be relieved of financial burdens heretofore imposed by morons, by a system of mandatory rescue-money deposits. For instance, every hiker who wants to go up Mount Hood in winter has to put down a deposit of $5,000 toward expenses society will incur if we have to rescue them. A party of 10 climbers would pay $50,000 into a fund, and if anyone in their group incurs rescue costs greater than his or her own deposit, the pooled fund would pay the remainder. The members of the group will get back, pro rata, any portion of the fund not exhausted.+The figure of $5,000 per hiker is only an example. Park or police authorities could levy deposits based on actual, historical rescue costs for the location and season. Thus, it might actually be fairer to require a $10,000 deposit per climber for Mount Hood in winter but only $5,000 for the same location in summer.+However it's done, society should not have to lose money to save morons. As it is, two climbers' bodies from months ago have not yet been found. Some unfortunate hiker this spring stands to suffer a terrible shock. Park police should warn climbers that the particular area they are planning to explore may contain two corpses, so don't be surprised if the scenery turns unpleasant. Morons should not be allowed to litter the landscape with their corpses.+Whatever Happened to Immigration Standards? The British degenerate Hugh Grant is allowed to come and go in this country without any restriction, despite his being guilty of public indecency in having sex with a prostitute in a parked car on a public street. Whatever happened to the "moral turpitude" restriction on people seeking to enter the United States? There was a time when there was a serious question of whether Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor could be kept out of the United States because of their licentious (extramarital) relationship. Ah, the good old days. Now we let a man convicted of "lewd conduct" ignore the border as tho he was born here — which, I'm pleased to say, he was not. How is it that he's not considered a "sex offender" and barred from the United States?+Of what value is a border if we let in British beasts like Hugh Grant and Simon Cowell?+Musical Harassment. CNN Headline News has a segment called "It's Your Money" in which the same few bars of music are played over and over and over and over again in the background, all the while the reporter speaks. Why? The music is not just annoying but also so loud that you have to strain to hear what the presenter is saying. Stupid.+There is at least 100 times too much music in the media of this country. Essentially every commercial has a jingle, every show has an opening theme and closing theme, and even documentarians feel a need to fill almost every second of their films with background music. Why?+Music was once rare, and could be appreciated for its rarity. Now it is everywhere, almost inescapable even if you turn the TV and radio off. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.+Whose Revolution?!? Dumbya today compared the war in Iraq to the American Revolution. He didn't mean that in Iraq, the local people are trying to drive out a foreign occupier who has made their country into a colony and sent massive force to put down the people. No, he meant that somehow we were liberating the people, and the people of Iraq were working toward democracy with our help. The reality is the opposite, as above.+But even more to the point might be comparisons to other wars and countries, as in the Iran-Contra affair, in which the United States was infusing money and arms into a civil war in Honduras to help insurgents in their struggle to oust a government. The money could not come from Congress, which refused it, so the Reagan Administration — another "conservative" Republican government that so loved the Constitution and the laws duly passed in accordance with it that it would not abide by either — sold arms to Iran, the very country George Bush is now railing against as a dangerous enemy infusing money and arms into Iraq, helping insurgents to attack a government. Round and round we go. Where Republicans will stop, nobody knows.+Second-Class Citizenship. Homosexuals and lesbians in New Jersey today got the right to submit applications for "civil union", the second-class version of civil marriage that New Jersey enacted this past year, and which is to take effect later this week. Gay men have now stepped up from third-class citizenship to second. That's an advance? The New York Times reports:

About a dozen couples visited clerks’ offices in New Jersey on Monday, the first day on which people were allowed to submit applications for civil unions, which guarantee all the rights and benefits of heterosexual marriage. New Jersey is the third state to offer civil unions, following Vermont, which introduced them to rapt national attention in 2000, and Connecticut, which quietly followed suit in 2005.

Outside of this small region of the Northeast, the rest of the Nation grants not even that, second-class citizenship. And even here in New Jersey we're supposed to be grateful for second-class citizenship. I don't think so. This is only step one from third-class citizenship. There is one more step to take, Governor and Legislature. Have the guts (or lower) to take that step.

"I wish they would just call it marriage," Mr. [Degn] Schubert said, "and be done with it."

Me too.+(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,144 — for Israel.)

Time to Bomb Germany Again. Germany, that bastion of freedom and respect for human rights, has convicted a man of saying unpopular things, and sentenced him to five years in prison. Mind you, he didn't even say them in Germany, but over the Internet. Still, Germany asserts the right to imprison anyone on Earth who says things the German government does not approve.+The issue is so-called "Holocaust denial", which German law criminalizes. But it could be anything. It's the whole thing (from Germany) about "and then they came for me": you start with one unpopular group, then move on to another, and another, and another, and pretty soon you have effected complete conformity to approved thought. That is not the behavior of a civilized, Western nation. Quite the contrary, it is Nazistic, and thus fitting for Germany.+What is more appalling is that Canada has co-conspired in the persecution of a harmless old man. Will imprisonment for five years kill a 67-year-old? No matter. Germany has killed so many people for disapproved views  religious, sexual, political  in both its unified and divided condition, what's one more? A dozen more? 10,000 more? Six million more?+Jews in Canada are praising the persecution of people for the 'crime' of denying that six million Jews were killed by Nazis. But how many non-Jews were killed by Nazis? You never hear figures for Poles, homosexuals, gypsies, common criminals, mental defectives, Communists, Socialists, or any of the many other groups persecuted by the Nazis. We are not to know how many of those people died. That's not important, because non-Jews are not important.+And how many people have the Jews killed, in Israel, thru Israel, by the international Zionist movement? We are not to know that either. Will we have Jewish genocide deniers hauled before the courts of the world some decades hence, once the power of the Zionist lobby is smashed, as the world reels back from the mass death and destruction that Zionism has unleashed upon the Middle East, Downtown Manhattan, Madrid, London? Will not just the top leadership of "Israel" be disposed of by a new Nuremberg court, but every defender of Zionist mass murder in every country be imprisoned by a world as indignant at Zionist crimes as supposedly-post-Nazi Germany is indignant at the crimes of Germany's one-time heroes, the true sons of the Fatherland who saved Germany from Polish 'aggression', as our heroes have saved us from Iraqi aggression?+Germany, Canada, and every other country that imprisons people for saying disapproved things is an enemy of civilization. The criminals against freedom of thought and speech should be destroyed. Bomb Ottawa, bomb Mannheim (where the court convicted a harmless old man), bomb Berlin. Why shouldn't we? It's just a question of power. Might makes right. Right?+Germany has the power to arrest an old man and send him to prison for things he has said. We have the power to bomb Germany for punishing things people say. What's the difference?+In pretending to renounce Nazism, Germany has embraced Hitlerian absolutism over the mind. Germany doesn't subscribe to the fundament of Western civilization, best remembered in the stance of that old subversive, Voltaire:

I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.

That sentiment is best remembered in the 1906 paraphrase by British writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall (under the pseudonym "Stephen G. Tallentyre"):

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

It doesn't matter to Germany, or Canada, or any of a number of other unfree countries, who said it. They don't accept it.+The very idea that people have the right to say, or think, things the government disapproves is unacceptable to such governments. 'How can a society possibly survive if people are allowed to think and say what they want?'+There is a society like that. It's called the United States of America. And we must champion that kind of total freedom of the mind. If that requires us to haul Germany and Canada before an international tribunal for crimes against freedom of conscience; if, indeed, we have to create such a tribunal; or if we have to send a few cruise missiles into the Parliament buildings of places like Ottawa, Berlin, and London to make the point that governments have to keep their hands off people's minds, that is little enuf to do in defense of the quintessence of our civilization.+We will ultimately have spent, according to NBC News and The New York Times, $1.2 trillion on the war in Iraq, for things not remotely central to the survival of our civilization. But we allow our 'friends' to trample the freedom of thought that our civilization is based on, without expending a dime or even an ounce of breath to denounce attacks upon free speech. I'd rather we spend a few billion dollars on cruise missiles and Shock-and-Awe campaigns against the enemies of freedom in what are supposed to be free countries. As Jefferson said:

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Instead of manure that nourishes freedom, we get courts in Germany pouring out toxic manure, assertions that somehow society is harmed in letting people believe whatever they damned well please about the "Holocaust".+Freedom is not defended by destroying freedom, not in Germany against Nazism, not in Guatanamo against Al-Qaeda (as tho our various wars against Islam have anything whatsoever to do with freedom rather than simply with Zionism).+You don't fite Nazism with Nazism.+(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,128  for Israel.)

A Real War on Drugs. Afghanistan provides us an opportunity to kill drugpushers on a large scale. Large numbers of savage mountain scum in Afghanistan are raising poppies to create heroin to poison Americans and other Westerners. They justify their criminal monstrousness by pretending that they 'have no choice'. Bull. There is always a choice of whether to commit crime or not, be it on the part of kids in American slums who can join gangs and push dope or go to school and seek work in the legitimate economy; or of Afghan, Peruvian, and other farmers in Third World hellholes who prefer to poison foreigners to taking other measures to support themselves — such as to stop having children they can't afford.+Tho we might have trouble waging fullscale military war against our own drug criminals, we have no such problem in eradicating Afghan drug criminals. We can bomb them, strafe them, napalm them — even nuke them, literally, with tactical nuclear weapons that can wipe out an entire valley's drug crops in 10 minutes. Thus can we show evil Afghans that drugs bring death; they do not afford savages a way to make a living by killing Western weaklings who use drugs to fill their empty lives, and all too often ruin their lives for decades or forfeit them to chemical poisoning, poisoning that could not occur were it not for beasts in Third World countries who rationalize away their criminality as "just trying to survive".+Oh? If you're trying to survive, you'd better stop growing drugs and exporting them to the West, because the West has the wherewithal to kill you all, in the fields, warehouses, factories, and homes you use to grow, process, and export drug "crops". You're doing it for the wife and kids? What if your crime gets your wife and kids killed, as they are exterminated in the fields they are harvesting or in the transshipment operations they are working in? Then you won't have to do anything for them but bury their lifeless remains. And once they're dead, the pressure is off. You don't have to make a lot of money to support a large family, just enuf to provide for yourself — if, that is, you manage somehow to escape the helicopter gunships, fighter-bombers, and cruise missiles that appear suddenly from nowhere and destroy everything around.+If it comes down to sacrificing Afghan poppy farmers or Americans poisoned by heroin, I have no problem choosing to have Afghan criminals die. No trouble whatsoever.+For thousands of years, civilized peoples have had to defend against rapacious mountain savages. The best defense is indeed a good offense.+It's very hard to develop a life-ravaging or even life-ending heroin problem with no heroin, isn't it? Every person involved in the heroin trade, from poppy farmer to international kingpin to small-time hood on the street, should be killed. That is what a real war on drugs would look like. And a real war on drugs would without question actually work. Our present make-believe "war on drugs", mere shadow boxing with gangsters and letting them ruin the lives of hundreds of thousands of people for the sake of profit, hasn't worked and will never work. We are suffering the consequences of a one-sided war in which the bad guys are free to kill without mercy and without restraint, but the good guys have to play by the rules. The rules of war, real war, are very different from the rules of due process for individual crimes. In war, you are entitled to kill everyone engaged in hostilities against you. You don't need to arrest them. You don't need to try them. You don't need to build a case or find witnesses willing to testify who cannot be intimidated or killed by the criminal class. You see people in a field tending or harvesting poppies, you kill them. Simple. Quick. Utterly and absolutely effective.+A law-enforcement approach to eradication of drugs is somewhere between extremely difficult and absolutely impossible. But methodical, military extermination of drug farmers and their contacts would work perfectly.+Essentially nobody is willing to face certain death from an irresistible, massive, methodical, military machine that can kill everybody it finds in an entire agricultural region, just to make a living. The U.S. military is not a drug kingpin. We have firepower the drug cartel can only dream about. The drug war must be militarized.+(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,125 — for Israel.)

Lincoln, Shmincoln. Barack Obama announced today his candidacy for President, in a speech outside the Illinois state capitol building (which is perhaps the ugliest capitol in the Nation), because Abraham Lincoln made a famous speech there, hostile to slavery. The introduction to that story said Obama compared himself to 'what many regard as America's greatest President'.+I have never understood the preposterously extravagant praise for Lincoln, who achieved nothing positive but just barely held the Nation together. For three years he appointed incompetents as top general, and we came extremely close to simply walking away from the Civil War and letting the South go, because democracies have very little patience, and cannot fite long wars. Lincoln's reputation rests on a surprisingly flimsy basis, little more than the Gettysburg Address, Emancipation Proclamation (a profoundly inadequate document that has been ritely criticized by multitudinous observers), and his unrealized hopes for national reconciliation:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

— March 4, 1865 - Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

One month and 11 days after that call for reconciliation, Lincoln was dead, murdered by an unreconciled Southern scumbag.+As almost happened with the (first) Civil War, the Nation ran out of patience with our second Civil War, "Reconstruction", and let the slime of the Confederacy drive out the Union soldiers and restore de facto slavery and intimidation of blacks in the form of the Ku Klux Klan and state-mandated racial segregation and injustice.+I defy anyone to explain to me why Abraham Lincoln is our greatest President.+No, our greatest President (to date) is George Washington. Almost everything he did lasted long beyond his death, from the very creation of the Nation to the tradition of the President's serving no more than two terms (violated only once, and then made into law by Constitutional amendment). Only since World War II have we thrown to the winds his caution about "entangling alliances", and we are not better off for that.+My city, Newark, NJ, has a distinguished statue of Lincoln by Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, outside the Old Essex County Courthouse, which in turn is by Cass Gilbert, the architect of the United States Supreme Court building and Woolworth Building.But we also have a distinguished statue of Washington, by Scottish-American sculptor J. Massey Rhind, who is represented in the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall. (Fotos are my own.) Both Lincoln and Washington spent time in Newark. I'm prouder of the Washington connection.+All that aside, I suppose Barack Obama could have done worse in choosing a site for his long-expected and thus anticlimactic announcement for the Presidency. He compared himself to Lincoln, which is perhaps a bit proud, not to say "arrogant". His being black (well, half-black to be more precise) and speaking freely at the site of a speech by the Great Emancipator probably played well with the "African-American" portion of the electorate. Of course, Obama is genuinely "African-American", since his father really was from Africa. The great preponderance of black Americans have no real connection of any kind with Africa, and wouldn't in a million years even dream of moving there.+They might not have had as much choice as they'd like had Lincoln lived, because he was no friend of the black wo/man. He did not believe blacks the social or intellectual equal of whites, and favored repatriation of blacks, back to Africa. Not that we could know, even then, where exactly in Africa to send them — just as long as they didn't stay here!+My neighbor across the street is from Liberia, a country established by American freedmen who did want to 'go back' to Africa, even tho they might not actually have been born there. As you can see from my neighbor's present home, some Liberians didn't want to be in Africa. Would Lincoln have smiled upon the return of freed slaves who went to Africa but didn't like it? Fortunately for Lincoln's reputation, we don't have to ask such questions, because Lincoln was killed on what is now Tax Day, 1865, long before he would, in his second term, have had to deal with what exactly to do with all those blacks he (pretended to) emancipate. (The Emancipation Proclamation actually freed no one, because it applied only to the states temporarily joined in the Confederacy, over which the Union had no actual power. In the states where the Feds did have power, Lincoln freed no one.)+Never mind that none of Obama's ancestors came here in chains. Barack's father was a student from Kenya, who came to this 'land of racism' of his own free will to study, got married, had a child, got divorced, then returned to Africa, never to see his son again.+One must wonder about the political savvy of a perceived-black politician who will almost certainly need Southern votes to become President, in comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln, a man despised by much of the South to this day. The South may be happy to take the Presidency from faithful Americans term after term, and to dominate the U.S. Congress, but that doesn't keep the South from cherishing the treason of their ancestors and proudly displaying the Confederate battle flag everywhere they are not stopped from showing it.+Perhaps Obama believes in that fantasm, the "New South". Yeah, right. There's a New South. Of course, it looks pretty much identical to the Old South. In 20 years or so, once migrants from Latin America have taken citizenship and start to vote in large numbers, there may well be a New South. Not today. And not in November 2008. So where are enuf votes to come from to elect a Northern black man? Darned if I know.+Is Obama's candidacy to be taken as a serious attempt to win the White House, or as an educational experience, a historic first to make way for some future successful black candidate? Does Obama see himself as succeeding, as actually becoming President? Or does he see himself as the Rosa Parks of Presidential politics, someone breaking a barrier (nomination by a major party), not as the actual winner of the ensuing contest? I don't know. Does he?+Plutocratic Obscenity. Fifteen members of the superrich committed an unprecedented crime against decency today, when they paid $30,000 — each — for a single meal. Some of the diners had trouble finishing the 10-course meal. Did they get a doggy bag?+As ABC News tells it:

Deepak Ohri, ... one of the event's organizers[,] admitted $30,000 is a lot to pay for a meal.

"When we look at only dinner, yes, it is expensive," he told the AP. "But when you look at the whole experience, it's the experience of a lifetime."

That should have been the last thing that monster ever said. His throat should have been slit, and every organ that might be needed by decent people should have been chopped out of his still-warm corpse. But there is no justice, so he and the 15 vile hogs who spent $30,000 on a single meal will not be punished in any way for their monstrous gluttony. Oh, they knew that what they did was wrong:

Organizers told the Guardian the guests included executives from Fortune 500 companies, a casino owner from Macau and a Taiwanese hotel owner, but their identities were kept secret.

You don't keep secret something you're proud of, or even willing to admit to. You keep secret something bad, and this was extremely bad indeed.+Let's put this in context. The CIA World Factbook reports that the per capita income of Thailand, where this obscene gorging occurred, is $9,100 per year. That's rite: the average Thai makes, in a full year, 1/3 of what those plutocratic beasts paid for a single meal. 1/3.+It gets worse. Compare the plite of people in the world's 50 poorest countries:

In the second half of the 1990s the average per capita income in the world's poorest countries, when measured in terms of current prices and official exchange rates, was $0.72 a day and the average per capita consumption was $0.57 a day. This implies that on average there was only $0.15 a day per person to spend on private capital formation, public investment in infrastructure, and the running of vital public services, including health, education, administration, and law and order.

In 2001, 34% of the population aged between 15 and 24 was illiterate in the poorest countries.

About 60% of the poorest countries experienced civil conflict of varying intensity and duration in the period 1990–2001 that, in most cases, erupted after a period of economic stagnation and regression. In Rwanda, for example, average private consumption per capita fell by more than 12% between 1980 and 1993, the year before the genocide occurred.

The per capita income of the world's poorest country, strife-afflicted Afghanistan, is $800 per year. $450,000 (the total expenditure in one day for one meal by 15 paying diners) is the equivalent of the entire annual income of 562 Afghanis. The per capita income of the Central African Republic, which is only the 10th poorest according to Infoplease.com, is $1,100. The $450,000 spent on one meal by the superrich equates with an entire year's income for 409 people in the C.A.R.+It gets worse.+In this day and age, there are still huge numbers of people dying from acute (short-term) starvation and chronic malnutrition. Figures as to starvation — to death — on planet Earth today vary widely, from 16,000 a day to around 40,000 a day. Periodically we hear of one hotspot or another, be it Ethiopia or Darfur, where the figures are elevated, but, day after day, malnutrition takes a steady, unbelievable toll of millions, around 15 million a year, mostly kids.+(You can do a little something about this. Regular readers of this blog will have seen mention of The Hunger Site, a website at which a visitor can click on a button, free, and a corporation will make a small contribution to feed the poor in the Third World. To date, that website has donated more than half a BILLION cups of staple grain to people in need. I make it part of my computer routine to go to The Hunger Site and its associated click-to-donate (free) websites every day, and hope you do too.)+15 evil slobs spent a total of $450,000 — plus tax and tip — on one meal. What else might they have done with that much food money?+The organization "World Vision" asks people to sponsor a child for $30 a month or a family for $40 a month. Sponsorship helps with much more than food. $30 a month works out to $360 a year. Thus, the $450,000 that 15 monstrous slobs spent on one meal could feed 1,250 children for a year. In similar fashion, "Save the Children" says that $28 a month ($336 a year) can not just feed a child in the Third World but also help with other needs. So with $450,000 Save the Children could take care of 1,339 kids for an entire year. "Feed the Children" says it can feed a child for a month for $8 ($96 a year). So, $450,000 could keep 4,687 kids alive for a year.+There are multitudinous other charities active in every country that could make very good use of the $450,000 wasted on today's Bangkok obscenity.+Marie Antoinette was beheaded for supposedly remarking casually, when the poor had no bread, "Let them eat cake." In 1793, there was no organ transplant technology available to give the poor some tangible and ongoing benefit from her death. We have such medical technology now.+An updated version of Marie Antoinette's comment, using the menu for Bangkok's paean to obscene ostentation and gluttony, would be:

Weird Science (Two Items).+(1) Self-Delusion on 'Climate Change'. The usually astute Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's Daily Show was instead a stupe tonite. The first half of the program, and the "moment of zen" at the end were given over to bewailing 'anthropogenic global warming'. I switched momentarily to News 12 New Jersey to check the temperature: 14 degrees Fahrenheit. The national news today led off with tales of horrendously subnormal cold across most of the Nation, but the Daily Show ran footage of glaciers collapsing into the sea and water running off supposedly melting icesheets. Where might that be?+The bulk of the United States is suffering thru an extended period of profoundly subnormal temperatures, the coldest in 10 years in places like Chicago, but the loons of 'science' and media keep ranting about global warming. Are these people stupid, dishonest, or insane? It is not possible for a sane person to believe in global warming when all around you people are literally dying from the cold, freezing to death. No sensible person can believe in manmade global warming when all around him the world is frozen.+Where might ice be melting? New York City, where the Daily Show is taped? No. The temperature did not rise even close to freezing all day. Not today. Not yesterday. 35,000 homeless people in the city were crowding into shelters, to keep from literally dying from the cold. But the Daily Show is so intent on its delusions that an ice cap could topple the Empire State Building and Jon Stewart would still be shouting "Global warming! Global warming!"+Where are those glaciers collapsing into the sea? Not in the Northern Hemisphere, not for months in the past, nor for several months to come. And what else can glaciers do when they reach the ocean but collapse? What does the Daily Show think icebergs are? Perhaps those entertainers don't understand that the iceberg that sank the Titanic in 1912 broke off from a glacier where it met the sea. That's what icebergs are, huge chunks of glacier that broke off when the glacier reached the sea. That's what has always happened. That's what will always happen. There is nothing new in this, and people play no role in it.+Plainly nothing is melting in much of the United States and all but perhaps the tiniest fraction of Canada. So where is this melting that Comedy Central showed? Antarctica? Antarctica is in its summer now. Summer. Ice is melting in summer. Oh my god! Ice isn't supposed to melt in summer! Oh, wait. It is.+The fact that the entire Midwest and the East as far south as North Carolina is seriously subfreezing means nothing to the true believer in "Global Warming". 'Don't bother me with facts!' To show what it might take to persuade nonbelievers that the planet is getting hotter, the Daily Show ran a film clip of a man surrounded by flames. The planet is burning up. Oh? Strip down to a bathing suit and step outdoors, Mr. Stewart. Perhaps that will snap you out of your delusions.+(2) Compulsory Gardasil. Rick Perry, the Republican Governor of Texas, has issued an "executive order" that ostensibly compels every schoolgirl in Texas to be inoculated against the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), an asserted cause of cervical cancer. He has no authority to order any such thing, and forcing subsances into children's bloodstreams is something no government should be permitted to do unless it protects against a communicable disease those children might otherwise pass to each other in class. HPV is no such disease.+A bill to require such inoculations has been introduced in Kentucky too. Why?

Rep. Kathy Stein, D-Lexington, says her proposal would help spare girls from the threat of cervical cancer, which claims the lives of nearly 4,000 women nationally every year.

4,000 a year? The Dallas Morning News says the figure is actually more like 3,700. But, for purposes of argument, let's bump it up to a whole 4,000.+We are supposed to spend billions of dollars to vaccinate tens of millions of girls because 4,000 women a year die from cervical cancer? What is the population of the United States that we should panic over 4,000 deaths a year? 8,000? No, actually, it's over 300 million.+Well, how many deaths from all causes are there each year in the United States? In the year 2000, there were 2,403,351 deaths. Each and every year about 2.4 million people die in this country. 2.4 million. (Of course, in the long term, every single person in the United States, and every other country, will die.) 4,000 deaths a year is 0.17% of total deaths. For that we are supposed to force every girl in school to take a vaccine that may or may not be effective and may or may not have side effects, the famous "unintended consequences" that every sensible person must bear in mind. Have we forgotten Vioxx? Fen-Phen? Thalidomide?+And what is Gardasil to 'gard' against? HPV. Is this a virulent, all-powerful disease that no other measure can cope with?+A webpage of the American Cancer Society called "What Every Woman Should Know About Cervical Cancer and the Human Papilloma Virus" provides this interesting information:

HPV is not a new virus, but we are learning more about this virus. Almost everyone who has ever had sex has had HPV at some time in his or her life.

How does HPV lead to cervix cancer?HPV is spread through sex and it can cause an infection in the cervix. The infection usually doesn't last very long because your body is able to fight the infection. If the HPV doesn’t go away, the virus may cause cervix cells to change and become precancer cells.

Precancer cells are not cancer. Most cells with early precancer changes return to normal on their own. Sometimes, the precancer cells may turn into cancer if they are not found and treated. Very few HPV infections lead to cervix cancer.

Let me repeat the key points here: "Almost everyone who has ever had sex has had HPV at some time in his or her life." "The infection usually doesn't last very long because your body is able to fight the infection." "Very few HPV infections lead to cervix cancer." That's what the American Cancer Society says. So why on Earth would anyone think for even an instant of forcing millions of girls to take a vaccine against HPV? And why not boys? If HPV doesn't cause cancer in boys and men, why would we think it does so in women?+The case against HPV is mostly a statistical correlation between the presence of HPV in women with cervical cancer. But if "almost everyone who has ever had sex has had HPV at some time in his or her life", why would a correlation between HPV and cervical cancer be meaningful?+This seems "science" gone mad. Or is it just a con game played by a pharmaceutical company to reap a windfall by forcing people to take a worthless vaccine?+Merck, the maker of Gardasil, is based in my state, New Jersey (about 35 miles from my house). If it can con bunches of states into forcing people to take Gardasil, Merck will make a fortune, and New Jersey will take in some extra tax revenue from Merck. That's not good enuf reason to force people to take something that has not been proved, against a virus that has not been proved to cause any cancer whatsoever.+But even if vaccinating girls — and boys? — with such a vaccine were wise (which I do not for an instant concede), that decision should be made democratically, by legislators openly debating, and listening to their constituents' objections. This is a very personal matter. Government is to tell people what they must take into their veins? Where does Government get any such right?+Most pointedly, where does a governor get the right to issue an edict over the general population? Governor Rick Perry was not elected Generalisimo or President for Life. He is just some fool off the street. Nowhere does the Constitution give any governor or other executive the right to force citizens to do anything not expressly mandated by legislation duly passed by a legislature they have elected.+An "executive order" is an order from a government executive to government departments. It controls only the executive branch of government, not society. To interpret an "executive order" otherwise is like accepting the idea that the CEO of General Motors has the power to require all Americans to buy a Chevy. After all, he's an executive. Why can't he issue an "executive order" over the entire population? Well, he just plain does not have that authority. He can't even order GM's own employees to buy a Chevy. Nor has the Governor of Texas the authority to tell private citizens what to do. A governor's executive order has absolutely no force of law over anyone outside government. None. Absolutely none.+Governor Perry's power grab over the bodies of Texas girls is medical rape. He is attempting to compel children to take something into their veins that could cause a different kind of cancer, or birth defects, or some other unintended effect years down the line. After all, vaccination's effects are expected to last for years, or you wouldn't inoculate 11- and 12-year-olds against a sexually transmitted virus. If good effects could last for years, surely bad effects could equally last for years.+Gardasil has not been around for decades. It has no proven history of safety. Even with well-understood vaccines that have been around for generations, there are small numbers of serious adverse reactions. Gardasil would not be the only inoculation girls will have taken. What if there is interaction or immunological overload? As CBS News has reported in the matter of multiple inoculations given to military personnel in Iraq, some recipients have died!+The scientific evidence of the 'cocktail' of vaccinations that veterans of (the first) Gulf War were required to take is unclear even now. Some people suspect that at least some of the sufferers of "Gulf War Syndrome" got sick from vaccinations. Do we really want to risk the health of millions of girls for the sake of a disorder that kills an insignificant number of women?+If there is something seriously wrong with Gardasil, we might not know about it for decades. And if millions of girls are inoculated with this new vaccine, even a small proportion of serious adverse effects could wipe out any advantage to administering it. In 20 years, for instance, there will pass thru our schools some 75 million children, half of whom are girls. 38 million forced vaccinations? If adverse effects occurred with only ½ of 1% of those girls, or their children, that would be about 190,000 young women who would suffer adverse effects that could include death to the woman or death or deformity to her child. For what? To stave off 80,000 deaths from cervical cancer in the following 20 years — assuming that no treatment for cervical cancer is developed in those 20 years? Is that sensible?+Gardasil could indeed be another Vioxx, Fen-Phen, or Thalidomide. If people voluntarily take it, that's one thing. But to force people to take it is quite another.+Rick Perry should be impeached. Or hanged. Or shot. Sic semper tyrannis.+(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,100 — for Israel.)

More Lies from Dumbya. Our make-believe President pretended to apologize for the words his puppetmasters put in his mouth, in pretending that his use of "Democrat" as an adjective was inadvertent rather than malicious.+As the Associated Press put it yesterday:

Democrats found it demeaning when the president, in his State of the Union address last month, referred to the "Democrat majority," as opposed to the "Democratic majority."

"Now look, my diction isn't all that good," Bush told the 200 lawmakers who wrapped up two days away from Washington with family and aides. "I have been accused of occasionally mangling the English language. And so I appreciate you inviting the head of the Republic Party."

He got hearty laughs. And he was careful to keep the "ic" firmly tacked on for the rest of his remarks.

What a bunch of bull. Republicans consistently insult Democrats with this "Democrat Party" crap, and have for years. It was long past time for the Demmies to call the Dummy on it. I rebuked the New York Post for using that partisan, insulting language, in this space almost a year ago, February 9th, 2006:

Linguistic Abuse. Republicans have a nasty habit of linguistically disparaging Democrats by using "Democrat" as an adjective. I sent the following short emailed objection to the New York Post today.

Why does the Post publish usages like this: "Suozzi, the Nassau County executive, and Spitzer, the state attorney general, are both eyeing the Democrat nomination for governor"? "Democrat" is a noun. The adjective is "Democratic". Any competent copy editor would automatically change "Democrat [nomination]" to "Democratic". Do Democratic-disposed publications have to invent a disrespectful term for the adjectival form of "Republican"? Would Republicans like media to say "Repub nomination", "Publican nomination", or "Scumbaggan nomination" rather than "Republican nomination"? Reputable publications do not use disrespectful slang to disparage a major American political party.

What took the Democratic leadership so long? And if other Republicans, and talk-radio slime, continue to use "Democrat" as an adjective, will the Democrats retaliate?+"Democratic" has been an adjectival part of the name of that great party from its founding, by Thomas Jefferson, in 1792, as the "Democratic-Republican Party". It is the oldest political party in the world, and "DemocratIC" has always been part of its name. If Democrats won't stand up for even their good name, how can we expect them to stand up for us?+(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,097  for Israel.)

S 'n M (Sickos in Media). For reasons beyond the comprehension of decent people, the media have been playing 911 calls from people caught in deadly storms in Florida. What kind of deviant wants to hear people in danger calling 911 in alarm and fear? I refused to listen to that non-news, audio descent into evil. There is no legitimate news purpose in broadcasting 911 calls unless there is a question as to what was actually said (as in a dispute over a crime), whether the 911 operator handled the call correctly, or some other case where the actual words are essential to resolving a controversy. No such issue was involved in this vile display of media sado-masochism. Everyone responsible for the decision to broadcast such calls, on every single media outlet that aired such audio  with, in many cases, subtitles for clarity!  should be fired immediately and barred from media for life.+There are enormous numbers of decent people who would love to work in media. We need not be captive to degenerates.+Multiply by 12. Just a note to remind readers how horrendous the death toll of Iraqis from George Bush's war is. To make the daily numbers more meaningful for Americans, you need to multiply by 12 to get a figure comparable to a similar incident's or day's toll in the United States, because the U.S. has 12 times as many people as Iraq. Most of us don't remember our 12X table, except perhaps for 12 x 12 = 144. That particular multiple is useful for today's toll, 121 people killed in one suicide bombing in a food market. 12 x 121 = 1,440 (12 x 120) + 12, or 1,452. In like fashion, we can break down 12 into 10 and 2, and thus ease mental multiplication of future death tolls. 58 dead? 10 x 58 = 580; 2 x 58 = 116; + 580 = 696.+So, in case 121 dead in a single incident in Baghdad doesn't make a big enuf impression, think about how we'd feel about 1,452 dead in Washington, DC in a single day. That is George Bush's war.+But the Democrats won't cut off funding for that war. They want it to go on almost as much as do the Republicans. Why? Because as long as Iraqis and other Arabs are fiting among themselves, they won't make a united attack upon Israel. Fatah and Hamas are fiting? Great! Sunnis and Shia are fiting? Fantastic! The more dead Arabs, the happier the Zionists who control both major parties of the United States.+If that is not what the people of this once-decent country want, they will have to take to the streets, write millions of emails to the White House and Congress, and otherwise take back their government from the Zionists who are disgracing us.+By contrast with the horrendous carnage Iraqis are suffering, the numbers for Americans killed there are trivial. Somehow Americans think those numbers meaningful nonetheless. Check the total as of today, below.+That's for more than three years. The equivalent of 1,452 dead in one day for Iraq approaches half our total for three years. For whom do you feel more sympathy? I have no trouble in mourning the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis more than the piddling numbers of U.S. dead from their (all-volunteer) participation in an unprovoked war of aggression.+Will we be sending politicians to memorials in praise of those "heroes" 60 years from now, as Japan's leadership today sends politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine to Japan's World War II dead? That Japan's (drafted) "heroes" slaughtered millions in a war of unprovoked aggression is something the Japanese do not admit, do not accept, and do not apologize for. Will Americans still be denying, 60 years hence, that our "heroes" too are criminals?+How long will our national conscience remain silent?+(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,097  for Israel.)

"Home of the Brave"? It is to Laf! Yesterday Boston police closed down highways and deployed huge numbers of cops to investigate supposedly 'suspicious devices'. The bomb squad even blew one up. Those 'suspicious devices' turned out to be advertising signs for cable's Cartoon Network! What a bunch of morons. And cowards to boot.+Similar 'devices' had been placed in nine other major cities, but no one in any of those cities called 911 about them, and no other public authority closed down highways in panic, nor blew up advertisements.+Now the Boston authorities, not content with looking like morons yesterday, are intent on making themselves look even more moronic and more cowardly by persecuting the two guys who placed those ads.+Let's be plain here. The fault is not in the ads but in the grotesque overreaction to those ads by ONE city.

In nine cities across the country, blinking electronic signs displaying a profane, boxy-looking cartoon character caused barely a stir.

Oddly, Boston is the one city that pretty much started the American Revolution. But Boston has apparently lost its guts in the intervening centuries. New York, which (unlike Boston) actually has had a major terrorist attack, was not so gutless.

The New York Police Department removed 41 of the devices — 38 in Manhattan and three in Brooklyn, according to spokesman Paul Browne. The NYPD had not received any complaints. [Nor had Seattle nor any other city  except Boston.] But when it became aware of the situation, it contacted Cartoon Network, which provided the locations so the devices could be removed.

The guys arrested should sue the individuals responsible for their arrest. Public officials do not have the right to act irresponsibly, as the Durham, NC prosecutor has found out. He is likely going to be severely punished for his wrongful behavior in regard to the persecution (that is not a typo) of Duke University lacrosse players. And the individual fools who arrested these ad-placers should as well be individually and personally sued and/or otherwise punished for their misbehavior.+Worrying about Nothing. Boston police are not the only cowards and fools in the Nation, of course. U Tube is showing an alarmist video report about attempts by some communications companies to 'privatize' the Internet and give preferential service to websites that pay thru the nose, while slowing down or cutting off websites that do not. My friend Joe in Belleville (NJ, which he sometimes calls "Bella Villa" because there are so many Italians there, including himself) sent me the URL to that site, but after I'd watched about 20 seconds I realized the whole issue was absurd, so turned it off.+As of two years ago, 75% of Americans had Internet access at home. The number has only grown since. Moreover, almost all the rest have access from the job, school, library, etc. How could Congress take away something that 90% of the people want? Would Congress dare to do anything to interfere with American access to the wealth of information available free on the Internet? Of course not, not any more than it would tax emails, another scare that ran thru the Internet a few years ago.+There are 535 members of the two houses of Congress. There are about 270 million Americans who use the Internet. If 1/5 of them wrote an email of complaint, that would be 54 million emails. Divide that by 535, and you get 101,000 emails for each member of Congress. What Representative or Senator is going to go against 100,000 constituents (more in the case of Senators from large states)? We just had an election in which the people ended what the Republicans had bragged would be a "permanent majority" because of vague discontents. How would either major party turn a blind eye to 100,000 emails per Congressmember? It's absurd.+Find something else to worry about, folks. But if you are worried, nip this in the bud. Send your own email to the President and Congress. The email address for the White House is comments@whitehouse.gov. You can find your Representative's website, with email info, at http://www.house.gov/; your Senator, at http://www.senate.gov/.+(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,085  for Israel.)